ARTICLES ABOUT OIL BOOM BY DATE - PAGE 2

FARGO, North Dakota (Reuters) - Residents of a small town in North Dakota were urged to evacuate after a BNSF train carrying crude oil collided with another train on Monday, setting off a series of explosions and fires, the latest in a string of incidents that have raised alarms over growing oil-by-rail traffic. Local residents heard five powerful explosions just a mile outside of the small town of Casselton after a westbound 112-car train carrying soybeans derailed. An eastbound 106-car train hauling crude oil ran into it just after 2 p.m. CST, local officials said.

As the current oil boom in North Dakota, Montana and Canada continues, long freight trains hauling dozens of black tank cars are rolling across the country and through the Chicago area with increasing regularity. With tank cars brimming with tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil, these trains have been described as "virtual pipelines" passing through heavily populated residential areas. But despite the hazardous nature of the cargoes on board, the vast majority of these tank cars do not meet the latest safety standards and should be retrofitted, according to federal officials and the railroad industry.

Proposed rules for horizontal hydraulic fracturing, released Friday by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, are raising the ire of environmental groups who say the draft would undo key components of the law that seek to protect the environment. The rules apply to oil and gas companies who plan to use the unconventional drilling method, which pumps hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical-laced water underground to break apart rocks that trap oil and natural gas. "We've been asked to speed up by some and we've been asked to slow down,” said Chris McCloud, spokesman for IDNR.

By Ernest Scheyder NEW YORK, Oct 24 (Reuters) - U.S. energy exploration companies leading a domestic oil boom increasingly are using stock options to find and maintain employees, evoking comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Some compensation experts and investment analysts worry that employees of small- and medium-sized firms that are still searching for sizeable profits could be lulled by a false sense of financial security. Options and stock awards can give cash-poor companies a powerful retention tool and foster employee loyalty, but they can also dilute earnings and employees often have to wait years to cash in options.

DAEGU, South Korea, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Rising oil and gas production and improving energy efficiency in the United States could slash its oil imports in half by the end of 2020 from levels seen two years ago, the West's energy watchdog said on Wednesday. The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this month said the United States would overtake Russia next year to become the world's largest oil producer thanks to its shale oil boom. Adding that development to energy savings from investments in efficiency will cut the need of the world's largest oil consumer to rely on imported oils, the IEA said.

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) - The company leading the U.S. oil boom in the Bakken oilfields in North Dakota said it would be open to talks with the Keystone XL pipeline project on it carrying a greater amount of domestic U.S. oil instead of Canadian crude. TransCanada Corp, the Alberta-based company that wants to build the 800,000 barrels per day Keystone XL pipeline to help link Canada's oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast, has said the line would take only about 100,000 bpd of oil from the Bakken oil fields.

WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - A leak of thousands of barrels of crude oil into a North Dakota field from a pipeline operated by Tesoro Logistics LP late last month is the latest in a string of recent pipeline accidents that are a costly side effect of the North American oil boom. The spill of about 20,600 barrels was first discovered on Sept. 29, but little was known about it until Thursday when the company put out a press release. Federal government officials could not be immediately reached for comment amid the government shutdown.